East Magazine

Last year, Robert Longo, like so many of his New York City peers, was a full-time resident in his weekend house here, improvising studio space in a basement, which he called “a storm of chaos,” while he waited to move into another house in Northwest.

In the midst of the pandemic, he was organizing “All for the Hall,” a benefit exhibition for Guild Hall, recruiting his friends to donate work and finding an eager artistic community ready to give back when it was so urgently needed.

Tempers flare and face-slapping breaks out when East Enders’ conversation turns to egg sandwiches. We are committing a social crime tantamount to treason by suggesting what we’re about to suggest, but here we go.

Sorry, egg sandwich. You heard it here: the Morning Taco from Carissa's Bakery beats all.

“What a hell of a man a man could become,” John Steinbeck wrote in The Winter of Our Discontent, the novel that cemented the Nobel Prize committee’s decision to award him the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature. Read between the lines and New Baytown, the book’s fictitious setting, starts to look a lot like Sag Harbor, where he lived while writing it.

Search #womenofweed on Instagram and an image pops up that could, at first glance, be mistaken for teatime at grandma’s. Captioned “High Tea,” the photo is an explosion of pink: floral wall paper, delicate bone china, and blooming peonies scattered about. Look closely though and you’ll see there are other buds — dried and green — on the table, as well as a feminine hand holding a spliff.

Unlike fiberglass, unchanging and inert, wood flexes and moves, it must be cared for, and it is temporal, decaying ever so slowly with anything less than the best of care. Trent Preszler’s exceedingly limited-edition canoes deserve that sort of care. Each is built to order in his North Fork woodshop and takes about a year to complete, give or take. 

Seaweed farming is the fastest growing aquaculture sector, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and shellfish farmers, conservationists, East Hampton Town, and New York State are taking action. Companion bills in the State Senate and Assembly would permit kelp cultivation in underwater lands at Gardiner’s and Peconic Bays, and allow Suffolk County to lease underwater lands for that purpose.

The East End is chockablock with yoga classes, some led by legends you may recognize from the cover of Yoga Journal. We all have our favorites, and out of loyalty to the many don’t often choose to throw the spotlight on just one specific teacher or class. But we’re making an exception for YOGA + SOUNDS + ART, because it is less a yoga class than a happening. Yogini Ashley McGee runs the scene every Sunday morning at 10:45, through October. 

Yoga class as a garden of delights — art and sitar, ocean air and CBD.

Brenda Simmons became a curator while working at Southampton Village Hall — commissioning school kids to create art for Black History Month. Now, she's the director of a new African American cultural museum.

From EAST magazine: An Excerpt From Amanda M. Fairbanks’s "The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown and the Four Men Who Vanished at Sea and the Survivors They Left Behind."

Cat burglars stole $375K in jewels from the tenor’s house in 1920.

Editor’s Note: To protect the identity and privacy of individuals the author knew when he was involved in the group in question, members’ names have been changed. East reached out to Sharon Gans and the School, but they declined to comment.

Michael Combs was going to be a plumber, or perhaps work on a New York City tugboat, like his dad. He was learning plumbing in high school in the 1980s in Greenport, and a skill in the trades promised job security and income. He’d grown up among baymen, market gunners, and hunting guides — hunters, foragers, and fishermen, many of whom were also, by need and nature, artists: decoy-carvers, lure-makers, self-sufficient men and women who could fix or build most anything. Young Combs watched and learned.